When I visited Pitsford Water last summer it looked like the picture below. But the picture above shows how it looked in the summer of 1976.
A BBC News page remembers the drought of 1976. My own strongest memory of that summer is of a coach trip to York.
The fields we passed were burnt up and there was fodder put out for the animals. And there were posters all across South Yorkshire trying to recruit men to the coal mining industry. (It was a long time ago.)
And on Sunday we shall see that at least one pop song was inspired by the drought.
My strongest recollection of the summer of '76 is the Elton John & Kiki Dee classic "Don't go breaking my heart". I went to an amusement park in a nearby seaside town every day that summer and they seemed to be playing that song on an endless loop on the tannoy by the bumper cars.
ReplyDeleteI remember a Private Eye cover from summer 1976. "Why is Denis Howell Minister for Water?" "Because he is so wet."
ReplyDeleteAccording to Wikipedia, Howell later became Minister for Floods and Minister for Snow.